What I want from NEO, as someone who organises from a phone

John Hallett shared a first look at NEO this week, the new front end for this network: a web app built with Next.js and a mobile app built with React Native, both running on top of UNA. I'm not a developer, so I can't tell you much about the tech. I can tell you what it's like to coordinate forty volunteers from a phone at a bus stop, and that's the angle I care about.

Here's my wish list, in order of how often each thing ruins my Saturday morning:

• Speed on bad signal. Half our clean-ups happen in parks with one bar of reception. If a post takes ten seconds to load, people give up.
• One app, not three. Right now our group chat, sign-up sheet and photo album live in different places. Events, posts and messages in one spot would save me so much copy-pasting.
• Big, obvious buttons. Some of our most reliable volunteers are in their seventies. The "Going" button should be impossible to miss.

From the screenshots, the layout looks clean and calm, which matters more than people think. A busy screen makes a new volunteer feel like they've walked into the middle of someone else's conversation.

I'll happily test it with our neighbourhood group once there's a beta. If you organise anything from your phone, add your own wish list in the comments so the team hears from more than just the developers.